Carbon nanotubes are a promising material for a wide variety of applications. They are of interest due to a number of potential advantages over currently used materials, such as intrinsically small size, extremely high carrier mobility, heat conduction characteristics, mechanical strength, and others. For example, in microelectronics applications, carbon nanotubes may replace silicon in transistor applications and/or metal traces in interconnect applications, depending on the chirality and other characteristics of the carbon nanotube employed.
To utilize carbon nanotubes in some applications, it is necessary to form a single patterned carbon nanotube or patterns of well-ordered and aligned carbon nanotube arrays. However, forming patterned carbon nanotubes has many difficulties. Current techniques typically include an in situ force (e.g., electric field or flow dynamics) to direct carbon nanotube growth. Those techniques have many limitations, such as directing carbon nanotubes in only one direction (i.e., along the field lines or flow direction), which limits the arrangement and design of the carbon nanotube patterns.